In more than four decades as an actor, Raye Birk has worked on regional stages across the country. He has taught college and he has directed. His profile on the Internet Movie Database includes nearly 100 credits.

But he has never done anything like this.

Two Sunday mornings ago, Birk got a phone call from Guthrie chief Joe Dowling, asking him to take over the role of Tobias in the theater’s production of “A Delicate Balance.” He was in the rehearsal room by noon, faced his first preview audience at the end of that week, and tonight — after two weeks of cramming lines in the car and putting his entire life on hold — he faces opening night.

“It would have been much easier to step into a big Shakespearean role at the last minute,” he said between bites of a chocolate croissant in the Guthrie’s coffee shop. “It’s one of the most intricate texts I’ve ever seen, filled with unusual language and syntax. And (playwright Edward) Albee has created this amazing, opaque, ambiguous world.”

The 65-year-old Birk is most immediately familiar to Guthrie audiences as Ebenezer Scrooge; he has played the old miser in the Guthrie’s staging of “A Christmas Carol” for the past four seasons. But the Flint, Mich., native’s connection with the Guthrie stretches back to 1967, when he earned an MFA at the University of Minnesota and worked at the Guthrie under artistic director Douglas Campbell.

“He taught me to speak Shakespeare,” Birk said, “and he taught me to drink. We all wanted to hang around with the big dog, and if you wanted to hang around with the big dog back then, that’s what you did.”

After graduation, he and wife Candace Barrett embarked on what Birk describes as “a portable life.” Teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Acting in Oregon. And then in Milwaukee. And then in San Francisco. In 1982, Birk decided to try his hand in Los Angeles.

He continued to work on the stage but carved out a respectable career with small, sometimes recurring roles on most of 1980s and ’90s better-known television shows (“Cheers,” “L.A. Law,” “The Wonder Years”) and plenty of the obscure ones (“Morton & Hayes,” anyone?).

The couple were wooed to St. Paul by developer Jerry Trooien, who wanted Barrett to help him develop a museum of mythology for the ill-fated Bridges of St. Paul project. Birk and Barrett set up residence in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood in 2003, and he quickly found a happy niche at the Guthrie.

He has worked steadily in a string of roles that began with the 2003 production of “Pride and Prejudice” and culminated in what he called “the greatest year of my career in terms of what I got to do”: a diverse and challenging set of roles in “Third,” “The Government Inspector,” “Old Wicked Songs” and, of course, “A Christmas Carol.”

“The term ‘consummate professional’ is thrown around too much, but that’s what Raye is,” said Gary Gisselman, who has directed the past few “Christmas Carols.” Those years of experience made Gisselman think of Birk after Tom Tammi withdrew from the cast (both he and Guthrie spokeswoman Melodie Bahan were mum on the reasons for the departure, describing it only as a “mutual decision”).

“(Birk) is really a protean actor,” Gisselman said. “He’s able to do a lot more than people think. He’s quick, he’s incisive, he understands things quickly. And he just comes in and works. It’s been a little bit strenuous this last week, but I had great confidence in Raye. I knew he would come in and be able to center the show in the way it needs to.”

Birk did, however, come into the process with some disadvantages.

“I’d never read the play,” he said, laughing. “I saw it at the Milwaukee Rep in 1972, but that was a long time ago. It’s a leading-man role, and I’m basically a character actor, but it turns out that it’s good casting for me, and there have been parts of the role that I’ve been able to inhabit pretty quickly.”

Which doesn’t mean it has been easy. Albee’s quirky writing doesn’t make for quick memorization, and jumping into a role in which the rest of the cast has already had weeks of preparation and rehearsal is hardly an ideal situation. Birk has had to ask for a line a time or two during preview performances and, as of Monday, was carrying around a pair of scripts — his own and another helpfully put together by stage management, highlighting the portions of the text that give him trouble.

“I’m probably working 17- or 18-hour days,” Birk says with a wry grin. “I’m not sleeping a lot, and Sunday was the first time in a week I’d looked at a newspaper.”

At an age when some actors are looking back, Birk says this rapid-fire work on “A Delicate Balance” reinforces his belief that “I’m at my peak. I have a certain maturity that comes with age. I was a brittle, cerebral actor when I first started in my career, but now that emotion you see on the stage is very easily available to me. It’s genuine 70 percent of the time, and I’m a good enough actor to know how to do it when it’s not.”

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